


Nightcap

by wordwhisper



Category: Chernobyl (TV 2019)
Genre: Hospital Number Six, M/M, ridiculous amounts of flirting and sneaking around
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-18
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2020-10-21 03:08:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20686505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordwhisper/pseuds/wordwhisper
Summary: in which a lot of cigarettes are smoked and new worlds are made inside Moscow's Hospital Number Six.





	Nightcap

**Author's Note:**

> I just finished 'Midnight In Chernobyl' and my Feelings™ for Toptunov and his story took hold in full force and then this sort of happened...(also inspired by the fact that we see the 'latency period' where the patients suddenly start to feel good again for a few days or even weeks (to the point where the doctors could barely keep them from discharging themselves) for Ignatenko and the other firemen but not for Toptunov, Akimov and the rest).
> 
> And, the usual disclaimer: this is based entirely on the HBO characters and does not mean to depict any real-life historical persons or events.

“Toptunov, are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’ll be right out.”

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand as he flushes the toilet, shakily drawing himself back to his feet. His stomach still feels queasy, but now that it’s over it actually starts to subside and feel a little better the way it usually does after you throw up while you’re sick. Outside, one of the guys waiting at the door of the bathroom laughs at something the others said, a bright, carefree sound that doesn’t seem to fit this place at all.

Toptunov moves to the sink to wash his hands, opening the faucet with clumsy fingers and letting the cold water run over his skin for a few moments until they’ve stopped to shake.

He catches a glimpse of his own reflection in the broken mirror above it as he rinses his mouth and the first thing he notices is how ridiculous his hair looks now, the way it makes his face seem even rounder, younger. A nurse had trimmed down to the roots right after they’d arrived at the hospital, quick and mechanic.

With one last look, he closes the faucet and turns away, shaking out his hands.

“Yeah, can you believe it?”, someone says outside, “It’s been two days and they still won’t listen to me. I’m walking and eating, the burns are fading, I don’t know how much healthier they’re expecting me to get.”

“Maybe it’s not that bad, at least there’s free food here.”

“I don’t think you can call that food.”, another one says, “My mother’s borscht is food, this is just some very poor attempt at it. Have you seen the soup?”

“Well who knows, maybe you’ll have your mother’s borscht soon, too. They said they’ll check in again this afternoon.”

For the first time, Toptunov wishes he could believe them.

*****

They get blood drawn every day and the nurse touches him like he’s her mother’s precious porcelain doll, her eyes on his face the entire time.

He wonders how to tell her that he barely even feels it anymore.

*****

“Where would you go?”

They’ve stretched out on blankets from Toptunov’s room on the grass in the small backyard of the hospital, the first stars just starting to appear in the stretch of sky that’s visible in the gap between the roofs of the building. It’s beautiful, the first thing he can remember falling in love with, seven years old and holding his mother’s hand while they were sitting on the low roof of their house.

"If you could leave here, I mean."

“The stars.”

“Which ones?”

“The one furthest away from here. See that one?”

He points to a small constellation on their left, four stars sweeping upward in a broad curve.

“The one at the top is not as bright as the others, so it must be incredibly old, older than our earth, older than most other things in this galaxy. Even its light is old.”

Their shoulders graze, just lightly, as his hand lands back on the blanket.

“Imagine what it’s seen.”

Somehow, it’s become their thing, something they do when being in that building, waiting for something that could take weeks to come, becomes so suffocating that it’s impossible to sleep. They’re not technically allowed to be out here, but the nurses never stop them.

They probably know too much to.

“Why didn’t you?”, Akimov asks after a few moments, like that’s the biggest problem with his idea, “Go to the stars?”

“I don’t know, to be honest. Maybe because everyone I knew was doing it.”

He turns his head to the side to meet Akimov’s gaze, gives him a small smile that flickers with starlight.

“Plus, very few people end up with their first love, do they?”

“Did you ever try it?”

“I started training once, for a few days. This hospital actually reminds it of that sometimes, the steel tubes, the equipment, the sterility, just in a really distorted kind of way.”

The side-look Akimov gives him at that reminds him so much of the nurses and doctors in here that he has to look away, eyes back on the sky above them.

“What about you?”, he asks, more to keep him from saying whatever he’s thinking out loud than anything else. “Where would you go?”

“The sea. A lonely beach.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere warm. With a little town to walk around in the evenings, see movies, try out local restaurants.”

“What would you do during the day?”, Toptunov keeps going, “just swimming?”

His heartbeat has started to pick up, steady against his ribs and somehow, right now, the whole thing feels more intimate than if he’d asked him what he was wearing.

“When I was eight or nine my mother used to take me and my sister to the Black Sea every summer, just us. We’d get up very early, just before dawn, pack a few cakes and blankets and head for the beach to watch the sun rise.”, Akimov replies eventually, shifting back to look at the sky as well. “I think I’d like to do that, see if it’s still that magical.”

“I just remember heat. Heat and sand and my father’s uniform.”

In the distance, there’s the sudden sound of fireworks going off in quick succession, followed by a few cheers in the street, and after a few moments he remembers that it must be the first people pre-celebrating the long May-Day-weekend.

“He always used to tell me that story of how Juri Gagarin baby-sitted me sometimes when my mother went back to her job and we had that one picture of me on her arm, eight months old, standing on an outlook post somewhere just before his big start into space.”

Someone whistles and he can hear that a few of the firefighters and other engineers have come out onto the railing on the other side to watch, voices bright above the noise. It’s one of the few times he’s heard them that animated since they came here.

“It’s weird, I have absolutely no memory of her that early, but somehow remember how it felt like when my father held me when I was two or three years old, how huge he looked and how safe it felt to be there. He was so proud when I got into that college, almost more than me.”

“Are you still?”

“Well it turned out quite well, didn’t it?”

“It turned out well?”, Akimov repeats and Toptunov can feel his eyes on the side of his face, “Even after –”

It almost, but not quite, what he’s been probably trying to ask him ever since they got here, so loudly that it sometimes felt like it was all they talked about in between the actual words.

He raises his hand again and covers a star with his fingertip.

“Yeah. Even after.”

*****

“Why did you really grow that mustache?”

Akimov had brought a bottle of Vodka this time that he’d found in an abandoned office shelf downstairs and they’ve been passing it back and forth for the past half an hour, watching the sun set in the window behind them. They both felt that it was too tight, too claustrophobic in the room, so they’ve kept it open in a kind of unspoken agreement, a light early summer’s breeze coming in and tugging at the curtains. It must have been a beautiful day, outside.

“Didn’t you hear, it’s supposed to make me look older.”

“Come on, that can’t be the only reason.”

Somehow, Akimov has ended up lying on the bed, his head half-hanging over the edge, while Toptunov sits on the floor in front of him. It’s a strange perspective, sharp, fine lines dipped in the fading light.

“Are you fishing for compliments?”

“Why, are you willing to give them?”

Toptunov laughs, his head falling back against the bed.

“Comrade, are you _flirting_ with me?”

Akimov ignores it, tracing a pattern with his finger on the bed sheet beside him.

“You don’t know yourself, do you?”

“Have you ever heard of Queen?”, Toptunov asks after he’s taken another sip from the bottle and passed it to Akimov. He turns his head to look at him, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah you know, they’re pretty famous.”

“Exactly, so one of my friends is a massive fan, he literally listened to nothing else for a few days after he heard them on some radio programme. We were actually planning to go to their concert in Hungary this year.”, Toptunov continues, leaning back again, “He liked their style, too, his sister kept smuggling him these clothes that you don’t get here, flares and silk blouses and I thought I could try it, too. I wasn’t really cut for the clothes, but the moustache seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“So let me get this straight.”, Akimov says, pushing himself up onto his elbow. The movement is a little sluggish, less graceful than usual. “You did that because you wanted to look like Freddie Mercury?”

“Basically.”

Akimov’s lips twitch before he brings the bottle to his lips and takes his sip, then hands it back. It’s rapidly approaching the second half of it now.

“I admit, that’s more creative than I was expecting.”

There’s the soft shuffle of the blankets as Akimov shifts on the bed beside him, a dog barking somewhere on the road in front of the hospital.

“I kind of like it this way, though. Not looking ancient is not always bad, you know.”

Toptunov looks back up at that and Akimov’s already watching him, braced on his elbows and shifted onto his stomach to be able to see him properly. He reaches out a hand, eyes fixed on Toptunov’s face as he traces his thumb along his top lip all the way to the corner of his mouth, then drops it down to follow the curve of his bottom lip until it gives beneath the pressure, mouth falling open slightly. The mustache had gone the second day, without the nurse shaving it. He’d expected fear, panic, some kind of reaction at least, but he’d felt nothing but a vague kind of detachedness as he’d flushed it down the toilet and never really thought about it again until now.

“Do you?”

“Yeah.”

Akimov’s hand leaves his face, slowly, carefully, and comes to rest on the covers at his side, eyes flickering down to his mouth before the settle on his.

“I definitely do.”

The angle is a little awkward, but it still works, somehow, Toptunov’s lips parting as Akimov’s close around them and he shifts on the bed to have more room to move.

Behind his closed eyelids, Toptunov sees galaxies explode.

*****

Two days later, there are three Queen records lying on the plastic table beside the bed in Akimov’s room and an old record player is perched on the windowsill behind them.

“Don’t look so surprised.”, Akimov grins when he sees him looking, “I told you, they were kind of popular.”

For a few moments he simply stares at the covers, clearly worn and well used, as Akimov gets up from the bed to grab one of them and takes it over to the record player. It’s ‘The Works’, the one Toptunov saved up for almost a month to buy back at Uni.

“Did you steal a record player?”

“Of course not, who do you take me for?”

He carefully places the record on the player, fiddling with the controls a little.

“I got a nurse to bring it here, they have one in their staff room for breaks. The records are mine, I asked my sister to bring them from my old flat in Moscow.”

The needle touches the Vinyl with a soft screech, then the first chords start to drift through, the volume turned up as far as it will go.

Akimov turns back to him once he’s done, still grinning.

“Well, it’s not quite a Queen-concert, but better than nothing, right?”

*****

“Look at that, Toptunov is _glowing_.”

“Yeah if we weren’t in a fucking hospital you’d almost think he finally got lucky.”, Pravik says from where he’s having dinner with two of the other firemen at the table in the corridor, some kind of thick soup that smells amazing even from his spot.

Toptunov just throws an empty cigarette-pack at him.

It’s much later, when he’s brushing his teeth in the bathroom and looking at the mirror that he realizes Pravik is kind of right.

It’s a scary thought.

*****

A Central Committee secretary comes to visit the next day, moving with painful care between them like he’s afraid of catching something contagious. He tells them they’re heroes, but it sounds so hollow that he flinches at his own words.

The medals stay in his pockets.

*****

“You know this is probably illegal, right?”

It’s past midnight, only the emergency lights still on above the entrance doors to the floor, and the whole building is so absolutely, completely quiet that he can hear the machines humming in the rooms on either side of them.

“I mean even more illegal than the other things we’ve done.”

“Oh, so you’re getting all responsible now?”

“Never.”

Akimov’s fingers are curled around his wrist, gently tugging him toward the staircase leading down to the level below. They’re surprisingly warm against his skin, like he’s kept a bit of the summer warmth outside even in the middle of this hell.

“Almost there.”

They turn left into a small corridor that looks like it hasn’t been used for years, paint peeling from the walls and cables hanging from holes above the doors. Toptunov feels the weird urge to giggle, bubbling up just beneath his skin, and for the first time in days he doesn’t think 'how long?'. Akimov stops in front of the last door at the end, so abruptly Toptunov barely manages to avoid running into him, which actually makes him huff out a puff of laughter. It feels almost foreign now, intoxicating and overwhelming. He lets go of Toptunov’s wrist to produce a key from the back-pocket of his hospital pajamas and turns it in the look with quick, mechanical ease before pushing the door open for Toptunov, just rolling his eyes when he raises an eyebrow at him.

It’s a small room that’s clearly been an office once, dust dancing in the light streaming in from the corridor before they close the door. The furniture has been removed, just an old wooden desk standing beneath the window opposite them, on top of it some kind of broken machine panel with faded red and blue buttons, a tiny microphone and a needle fixed to a draft paper to register some kind of reading. Beside it, there are two doctors’ overalls perched on the edge of the desk, complete with caps like some kind of strange space-suits.

The windows are open wide, the sky cloudless behind them and a low, almost full moon hanging above the edges of the roofs. Toptunov had never seen it that clearly before now.

“You did steal those overalls, though, didn’t you?”, he finally asks, voice rough because his throat has suddenly closed up, the words catching half-way.

“Borrowed.”

“And that machine?”

Akimov walks over to pick up one of the uniform caps.

“Well you did say you wanted to go to the stars.”

“The far ones?”

“Wherever you want.”

He puts the cap on Toptunov’s head, gently arranging it until it sits properly while Toptunov watches his face. There’s a brief flicker in his eyes that tells Toptunov that it’s bringing back something from that night, too close to what they wore then, before he pushes it back.

“Suits you.”, he whispers, eyes flickering up to meet his, “Kind of.”

Something about it makes a fierce, reckless kind of uncontrolled hunger surge up that feels like it’s been building for days, for being alive and proving it, to feel something before he can’t.

This is his last chance, he realizes, to take that from life, too.

“You know when I said stars, I didn’t necessarily mean that literally.”, he eventually says because otherwise he’s going to say something that’s going to make this even harder than it already is.

Akimov’s gaze immediately snaps back up, lips parting as he realizes what he’s saying.

He’s close enough for Toptunov to hear him suck in a breath just at the thought of it.

“Are you –”

Toptunov’s hands go to the white shirt the nurses had given him after they’d come here, still marked with its serial number, lifting it over his head and dropping it on the floor.

Akimov’s eyes stay on his chest, dazed.

“Yeah. I am.”

*****

Pravik has barely opened his mouth before Toptunov shots him a look that, surprisingly, actually makes him falter for a moment while he sits down next to him with his bowl of vegetables that look like they’ve been cooked a lot longer than they should have.

He’s so pale that it makes his eyes look darker than they actually are and Toptunov can see new bruises along his arm just below his elbow and on his legs where the nurses have cut off their trousers. He tries not to dwell on that.

“No, seriously, you’ve got to tell me how you do it.”, he finally caves once Toptunov has eaten his first few fork-fulls, “we’ve barely been here a few days.”

“Shut up.”

*****

The next morning, his white blood-cell count drops below two thirds of the normal one.

The doctors tell him that it’s still within normal limits considering the circumstances, better than they expected.

Their eyes tell him that it’s not going to be long now.

*****

“Did you ever want to get married?”

They’re leaning against the railing of the balcony overlooking the yard, smoking cigarettes from one of the packs that friends and relatives keep slipping them during their visits, which is almost as unsettling as the doctors’ pitying looks.

“Is than an offer?”

The smoke curls around Akimov’s lips as he exhales, fading into the black sky above, before he turns to him and smiles.

“I don’t know, would you say yes?”

*****

That night, the nausea comes back.

He barely makes it to the bathroom at the end of the hallway and into one of the stalls before the chicken soup Akimov had brought over to share for dinner comes back up, burning and acid. There’s barely anything there to throw up, but somehow his body still tries. He braces his hands on the cool plastic edges of the toilet seat just before the next weave hits and has him doubling over again until his whole body is shaking.

It’s completely dry this time.

He draws back gasping, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth as he slides to the floor.

_Time is up._

**Author's Note:**

> dedicated to those who've encouraged me to write more in this fandom the last time and have been incredibly lovely in the comments, I hope it lives up to expectations! 
> 
> As always, thank you for reading and if you want to come talk to me about Chernobyl, this fic or anything else I'm still on tumblr @ wordwhisper.tumblr.com. And yes, I'm physically incapable of writing a fic without a Queen-reference. And yes, they actually did go to Budapest on July 27, 1986, not long after Chernobyl.


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